Gladwell and Simmons

Malcolm Gladwell talks to Bill Simmons on ESPN today; I don’t normally excerpt this much, but this exchange is too good to ignore:

Simmons: …As for your Curry/Mickelson point about athletes failing to motivate themselves out of fear more than weakness, I would argue that Eddy Curry comes to camp overweight because he can’t stop eating. But I agreed with everything else. Which leads me to a question that’s definitely in your wheelhouse: Can you explain the Contract Year phenomenon for me? What is it about the mentality of professional athletes where they sign huge contracts, then they either mail in the rest of their careers, or it takes them the requisite, “All right, I just made a crapload of money, maybe I don’t have to try as hard” year before they bounce back in the second year? It’s gotten to the point where I specifically avoid picking players for my fantasy teams who just signed huge contracts — it’s one of my steadfast drafting rules, right up there with “never take a player who just spent more than 90 days in prison” and “never take anyone older than me.” But this only seems to happen in sports.

So what’s the cause? And why does this happen mostly in the NBA, and almost always with tall centers? Do they fold from the weight of the contract and the expectations that come with it? Do they lack a certain amount of professional pride? Would most Americans do this if they were guaranteed copious amounts of money regardless of the quality of their work? I mean, imagine having a friend tell you, “Good news, I just signed a big deal to stay with my law firm … I’m going to completely mail in the next three years, this is gonna be great! Wow, did I dupe them!” Would that ever happen? I’m convinced that it’s a phenomenon unique to sports. Maybe you should follow Erick Dampier, Mark Blount, Jerome James, Scot Pollard, Juwan Howard and Kwame Brown around for three months for a book called, “The Dipping Point,” with special forwards from Jim McIlvaine, Calvin Booth, Shawn Bradley and Michael Stewart.

Gladwell: This is one of my favorite topics. Let’s do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn’t try, he’s mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He’s not inherently good or bad. He’s both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can’t get Dampier to try, then you’re not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.)

In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let’s think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he’s basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid’s talent and ability — or, in this case, lack of it.

But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he’s just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn’t smart. If talent doesn’t really mean that much in the case of Dampier — if basketball ability is incredibly variable — why don’t we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we’d say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We’d think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don’t we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I’m being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we’re all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We’re forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society’s underachievers.